


The Branch

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [42]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Post-Canon, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 06:44:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14764607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: Epharia finds a relic. Ghosts refuse to leave them alone.





	The Branch

Two hundred and twelve days after Max left the Citadel, he was forced back into human company. He needed to trade for water and edibles with spare parts he’d scrapped from the wrecks outside the mountains, where he and Furiosa had first met. It was strange to see so many cars lying broken, unclaimed, but the War Parties had been in a hurry and had done a shit job picking over the dead bones of Buzzard and Citadel cars.

Max kept pausing to shake his head, trying to dislodge the buzz of ghosts in his ears. He resolutely ignored the way Glory would flicker in and out of view, swinging her feet off a crumpled bumper or peering out of the corner of a shattered windshield. Harder to ignore was the silent, accusing stare of the lost Wife, Angharad, who paced behind Epharia in her billowing white linens and never said a word. Max flinched every time he caught sight of her.

It’d been two hundred and twelve days, but he still felt a gut-twist of guilt when he got on the bike he’d found hidden in a corner of the lift cave, obviously needed by Furiosa and the Wives. He’d taken it anyway, because he and Epharia had needed it more, the leaving raging in his head louder than any ghost. And it had seemed more than a coincidence, that after Joe had pulled every vehicle capable of driving onto Fury Road, that this one should’ve been left behind. Left for Max, the only escape route from an inescapable place.

The Citadel still loomed behind him, a dark imprint of towers at the edge of his mind. No matter how often he tried to put that place out of his mind, like so many other places he had been, it remained. Stubborn as stone and twice as menacing. The Wives took their places in Max’s nightmares, though he _knew_ he hadn’t failed them. Not like he’d failed the others.

And Furiosa… Furiosa did not haunt him in visions or nightmares that clung like spiderwebs, easy to brush aside in the morning. Furiosa haunted him in other, deeper ways; there was an empty space where she belonged, a space his eyes skittered over, expecting her to be there. He found himself laying an extra gun out, like she would pick it up and take the next watch. He saw a sandstorm going past, close to the horizon, and he’d braked to a full stop before he remembered that there was no one there to point it out to.

Max scavenged for three days, tying what he could to the back of his bike and jury-rigging extra tanks for guzz to keep the bike going. But he found himself digging up rifle cartridges, pieces of fabric with interesting colors and patterns, putting together a pile of scrap that might be useful in making a mechanical arm. He didn’t even realize what he was doing until Epharia asked him about it. He’d had no answer for her, either, only swept the collected scrap into his bag and pretended it had never existed.

There was a place, far east of the Citadel, where a town had once been. All that remained of it now was a collection of dry bones and buildings that occasionally were taken over by nomadic families. Some of these were open to trading, but it was always a roll of the dice whether they would trade with you or kill you. Max had a lot of experience with playing Fate’s game, and while he didn’t much like his odds, the Wasteland seldom gave him a choice about rolling the dice. There might have been good salvage out at the rough hills beyond the Citadel, but there was no water in the barrels and nothing edible either. He siphoned as much guzz as he could and set off for the dead town, Epharia racing along at the side of his Citadel bike.

And in the midst of the trading, Max with a gun in his hand, safety off, one nomad with a rifle aimed at his center mass while a one-armed woman with a rottweiler daemon negotiated, one of the dead Vuvalini shook her fist in Max’s direction. She was standing next to the traders’ bikes, where piles of junk were waiting to be repurposed, silver hair gleaming in the sunlight almost like she was alive.

Max blinked several times and looked away, tapping his pistol against his leg. The traders noticed his unease, and glanced between each other, and Max scowled. If this went south he’d have to kill them, and he really didn’t want to do that.

Though Epharia was more nervous around ghosts than he was (she was a daemon, and they never had ghosts), she went when the old Vuvalini started shouting. “You! Fool! Get over here, can’t you see what you’re missing! This thing doesn’t belong in human hands, it belongs to a witch!”

“Quiet,” Epharia hissed, slinking over. The rottweiler watched her with a growl so low-pitched no human would hear it, and the one with the rifle had his chameleon daemon watching her too. “Can’t you see he’s busy?”

“Just take a look at this,” the Keeper of the Seeds said, and Epharia looked. For half a second it was just a pile of junk; scrap too small to be used to repair cars or engines, broken bits of glass and the charred, the brittle remnants of thundersticks. But there, on the edge, was a flash of true green, not bottle-green or plastic-green but living, growing green. Epharia stepped closer, one eye on the hostile daemons, sniffing at the air, desperate for the scent of something sprouting.

It was an old smell, one she hadn’t scented in forty years, or longer. It was not growing, not precisely, because it had not been attached to a living tree in a very long time. But it was cloud pine she smelled, familiar because she and Max had always been chasing after it as unsettled kids, always searching but not finding the one they were looking for. The old Keeper had smelled of it too, and there had been a tiny sprig of green needles in her bag, kept alive by her magic. But that was then, and this was now, and she was dead.

“It should be dead,” Epharia muttered, but it wasn’t. It looked like nothing so much as a piece of ancient driftwood, gnarled and knotted and about the same length as the nomads’ drifter bikes, tricked out for long-distance travel. There were three bunches of needles left on the old branch, and in one of them Epharia saw a tiny pinecone dangling like the promise of a new world.

She was still wary of sharing names with strangers; there was no need to attract more ghosts. To call Max’s attention, Epharia barked twice and dug at the junk pile, setting her teeth into the ancient wood and finding it dry but not brittle in her jaws. Her bark made the rifle-man jerk, and Max had his gun half-raised, but there were no shots and the rest of them watched in silence as Epharia struggled to pull the cloud pine from the pile. The Keeper didn’t lift a finger, but smiled smugly at Max over Epharia’s back.

“We want this,” Epharia dragged the branch back to the nomads and spoke to the woman directly, a trespass that had her daemon bristling. “It’ll be part of our trade.”

“It’ll cost ya,” the trader said, putting a calming hand on her daemon’s head. “Had a plan for that bit, I did.”

It cost them more than Max wanted, but not more than they could afford. There was only so much room on the bike, and everything he traded had to give back equal weight. Epharia’s obvious interest in the cloud pine undermined that rule, but most of Max’s ‘negotiation’ involved silence and scowls, so he didn’t feel too put out.

By the time they’d made camp, about twenty miles out of the dead town, the pine had regained some of the color in its wood, and the pinecone Epharia had seen was slightly bigger. Max swallowed down a can of beans, and then, because it was their first meal in three days, he opened another. All the while, he watched the branch as if expecting it to fly off the handle and thump him about the head. The Keeper had come back to run her dark, wrinkled hands along the branch, sighing when her fingers passed through the old wood.

“Our last cloud pine died in the Bog Years,” she said, the most coherent ghost Max’d ever met. “Keep this one safe, boy. Keep it safe for my sisters and my daughters. And for her.”

“We’ll keep it, but we’re not going back.” It was Epharia who said it, when Max only shifted and curled into himself and kept eating. “It’s for us, understand? Just us.”

“Of course, you’ve got the bloodline for it,” the Keeper said, but she looked displeased. “Do what you think’s best. After all, what do I know? I’m dead.”

After she vanished, Epharia let her fur bristle and crossed the sand to Max’s side, peering over the edge of the dune that sheltered them. “That’s the most words a ghost’s ever said to us,” she said, with no real expectation of an answer. Max grunted what could have been an agreement, and his daemon slid back down to sit beside him. “Words are hard, but we should keep them. As long as we can, anyway.”

He looked at her, and it wasn’t quite a glare. “You think I wanted to forget what it was to speak?” Max ground out the words, and immediately they both felt the herculean effort behind them. “Why’d you even want that thing? If we’re not going back?”

Epharia bristled. “It’ll be a good escape route; we can use it, and non-witches can’t. That’s all I was thinking of.”

They both knew that wasn’t true, but Max let the lie stand. And underneath the lie was a rebuke, because this was what words could bring them. Epharia went to sleep in the shadow of the bike while Max kept watch just under the edge of the dune, licking as much of the inside of the can as he couldand watching the cloud pine grow.


End file.
